Gay Romney adviser, hit by the right, resigns

Richard Grenell has resigned as Mitt Romney’s foreign policy and national security spokesman after less than two weeks on the job, under fire from the conservative press because he is gay.

Grenell worked for four United Nations ambassadors during the Bush administration, from the ultraconservative John Bolton to moderate Republican ex-Sen. John Danforth.

He quit after what the Washington Post‘s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin described as “a full court press by anti-gay conservatives.” Grenell said in a statement he could do effectively do his job due to “hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign.”

Romney

“We wanted him to stay because he had super qualifications for the position he was hired to fill,” said Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades.

Grenell was also known for at times acerbic tweets about prominent women in public life, most notably Michelle Obama and Callista Gingrich. He deleted more than 800 tweets after taking the Romney job.

But the appointment stirred thunder on the right.

“Suppose Barack Obama comes out — as Grenell wishes he would — in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention: How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?” asked Matthew Franck in National Review.

Washington, D.C., has long had a population of gay conservatives — they were nicknamed the Lavender Mafia during the Reagan administration — but few come out of the closet.

One who did was David Brock, who started as a right-wing polemicist (“The Real Anita Hill”) but found himself ostracized by his sponsors after writing an even-handed book about Hillary Clinton. Brock has since penned a bestseller (“Blinded by the Right”) about what it felt like to be a closeted gay man in the conservative movement, and was a founder of the mediamatters.org watchdog website.